For most players who don’t have the new Nearby system, ‘Sightings’ only highlights Pokémon in the immediate general area, rather than teasing you with critters that aren’t actually nearby at all (previously, these monsters were marked as three footprints away). Also, now there’s grass. Yay?

This new system showcases fewer monsters than before, though as commenter Professor Dog pointed out to me, it does get rid of duplicate creatures. That’s a plus. Reports online also indicate that this new system update its monster list more often than the older one, which is good. It means that, while you will have to do some wandering to capture something specific, hypothetically you aren’t flying blind for as long as before.

Despite some improvements, I’m in disbelief that they’ve kept the system this vague considering that nobody could figure out the previous one. But hey, this isn’t permanent. It sounds like Niantic is still fiddling with finding a new system to replace the old ‘Nearby’ one, and that eventually they’ll settle on something better. In the meantime, this test will give them lots of feedback to work with.

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Also fixed: battery saver is back, and the game is now awarding the appropriate amount of XP. Hooray!